The still beating heart

We have these /comfy/ threads on /r9k/, I’m sure most of you already know what I’m talking about. To the one or two who don’t though, essentially people will post art, photos, music, and tell little anecdotes that in one way or another have this common feeling of “comfy” linking them all together. Of course the word comfy, or comfortable, is far older than 4chan but the way it is used makes the /comfy/ of 4chan a unique idea. It’s a little like this Danish word. See in Denmark they have this word hygge, and there doesn’t seem to be a direct translation to English but from what I’ve read it describes a general feeling of cosiness/ warmth gotten from certain activities. So, drinking a hot chocolate while it snows outside or sitting near a fire place and listening to the crackling sounds as it gets dark out. Apparently this is a large part of Danish culture, the best way of putting it that I heard was from this one guy Meik Wiking who said that “Hygge” is to Denmark what “Freedom” is to the US. Now I don’t know how true this is, after all this guy is trying to sell this hygge idea it might be entirely manufactured but it certainly illustrates the concept quite well. The word exists in other Scandinavian/ north Germanic languages or something very similar but it doesn’t have quite the same weight to it. So in Norway it’s just their way of saying cozy or homely, at least that’s what I’ve gathered, whereas in Denmark it’s this central idea. You could say there’s the lower case and the upper case hygge. Similarly you have “comfy” as it’s used by normal people every day and you have “Comfy” the romantic ideal.

Now the two aren’t synonyms, I’d actually say that /comfy/ is far larger in scope. See /comfy/ is a bit different for everyone. The different things people put in those threads reflect their own sense of it. Sure there’s a lot of overlap, in fact a lot of things that would be pretty hygge would also be /comfy/ for many anons. You see a lot of the same images reposted often, but there’s quite a lot of different kinds of things. Deckard’s apartment from Blade Runner, a group of anime girls living in a caravan, a photo of a cup of coffee near a window. Ambient music, or folk, or something that just has nostalgia value and most wouldn’t find /comfy/ at all. Some anons like an old timey aesthetic and others prefer a futuristic place to imagine themselves in, hobbit homes and personal space ships. Even though there’s quite a lot of variety, and almost everyone is going to find things in those threads that they don’t get or understand why someone considers them /comfy/, there’s an understanding that the feeling experienced is the same in substance. I’m not really too happy with my explanation, but the explanation isn’t the purpose of this entry it’s just some preliminary information. Hopefully you already know what it is I’m talking about. No, what I’m here to talk about is the only real through line I can identify that connects everything that /r9k/ might consider /comfy/. Yes, the term is used site wide and in fact even outside of 4chan nowadays as it’s kind of spread out like everything does, but it did originate there. I know the /adjective/ meme is a more general thing too, but I’m not here to talk about 4chan shit. Honestly the “culture” for lack of a better term there isn’t something you can give a quick rundown on you have to just live in it, that why the whole lurk more thing came about. I mean I first started visiting maybe late 2011 and I still would be considered a newfag. Of course even that whole new/ old thing is only half serious, it’s literally just a website where people post pictures and make the same stupid jokes over and over. I don’t want to get side tracked here, these recurring /comfy/ threads are what I’m talking about and the idea may have spread and become diluted or changed but it doesn’t matter because I’m not talking about those cases.

One huge thing though is the amount of artwork or oc that taps into the greater board mythology, I’m using the term loosely but it’s definitely something that exists. I mean you have these figures, and yes the more famous ones are not board exclusive or even site exclusive, but they are most developed on /r9k/. The thing is, pol9k is a real thing and that demographic (not the best term, but the best I can think of right now) absolutely dominates the site now. The radicalised virgin, the 2010s upgraded version of the 00s neckbeard caricature. Very few if any individuals embody all of the traits associated with such a character but as a collective all of them show up frequently. So of course a lot of what develops kind of organically on /r9k/ is spread out quickly because /pol/ is so huge now and there’s that overlap thanks to this demographic and gets picked up by normals. Maybe the most famous example is the virgin walk image which existed as a standalone joke that was posted for years. One day someone made some absurd response image to it, the chad stride, and now a couple years later you have some facebook boomers making “Virgin thing I don’t like, Chad thing I do like” memes who have only ever heard of the hacker known as 4chan through fox news segments. Anyway that’s just another tangent, my point is that I’m well aware that most of these characters (pepe, wojak, spurdo and the various variants that have become their own characters after a while) both existed before the current “culture” on the board had developed into what it is today or even before the board existed at all and exist beyond it. You don’t get stuff like pic related anywhere else though, do you?

Yes I know it’s an edit, the original was from the poopoopeepee days though and that whole situation was an earlier part of this board mythology I’m talking about anyway. In fact that whole thing was a response to the characters becoming adopted by so many normies, which further goes to show how these little cartoony beings are inextricably tied up with the place. It’s such a lovely little comic strip as well isn’t it, really warms the heart. You see, these various characters seem to me to form a pantheon, and much like the gods of ancient Hellas these characters show up all over the artwork of various creative robots. You couldn’t really create a serious canon from all of these drawings and things, with a continuous story or something like that, it’d be impossible. These characters just are, they exist in all these separate stories and none of them at the same time, just like the hundreds of poems and plays and works of classical art featuring the Olympians. This is ongoing and like I said earlier organic, I deliberately chose a more recent and kind of shoddy image for the main picture of the post to help show this. There’s stuff like it being made often and by all sorts of people. Well, all sorts of robot anyway. These characters have certain traits we all kind associate with each of them, and we know when one is being used over another what they’re trying to represent. These characters personify various aspects of ourselves, and can be used to create a feeling of sadness or melancholy, of joy, of anger, and most importantly of being /comfy/. The funny thing about the things that feature these characters though is this sense of friendship or being at ease around one another these characters all seem to have when two or more are put together. Even in the ones where they’re messing with one another, and sometimes those can get really fucking weird, there’s this sense that they’re still part of this great and unbreakable friendship or even familial bond. Which again I can’t help but see in parallel to not just the Greek pantheon but Norse mythology as well. See a lot of people think there was this codified story of the gods in these societies, and all the famous folk stories featuring them were believed to be true. Of course that’s a very materialist and modern way of seeing things, and it misses the whole point of these ancient mythologies and the characters they feature. No, there’s stories where they fight and die and betray one another and come together to deal with greater threats and there’s so much no one could possibly believe it all happened and in some kind of order. Some stories might even outright contradict others, but yes if you want to see how the gods of antiquity were used in stories and sagas you should think about how gondola or wojak or that retarded version of pepe are used.

It’s funny to me because this sense of there being a friendship or bond is almost exclusive to the art featuring these characters, in the /comfy/ threads I mean. Almost everything else posted, photos or artwork or music etc. feels very solitary in theme. Maybe this isn’t surprising at all, this is /r9k/ after all it’s filled with isolated and lonely young men, but remember these threads are meant to be about what we find comfort in. So it is interesting that it is often (admittedly very pretty) art of empty bedrooms, or isolated winter cabins, or small ships floating through space. Fuzzy lo-fi music, usually pretty melancholy, that brings to mind the idea of a summer stuck indoors. All tied together with the things that people in the thread talk about, how they’re getting /comfy/ themselves. Naturally because it’s a bunch of NEETs and hikkis or sometimes wageslaves who are still very shut in the rest of the time like myself finding this comfort in old video games and films, simple things enjoyed from home like a hot drink and most importantly these threads themselves. Both alone, and in good company. In the wizards tower with a nice heavy blanket, with the Palantir at hand. See, I first started thinking about this when I made that post a couple of weeks ago. Why I like to romanticise my situation, cut off from people and it’s not merely cope or an attempt to make it more bearable. It’s because, I actually in some sense quite like it. I mean I long for good company sometimes to be sure, but I also take solace in being away from people when things become too stressful. I think I mentioned this before here but I actually used to have a very romantic view of the hikikomori archetype when I was a lot younger and still not necessarily on the path to aligning with it so closely as I do today. It’s because I (and I think it’s fair to say you can extrapolate to a lot of other robots too) have always been drawn to similar figures. The wandering ronin, the chivalric knight-errant, the wizard cooped up in his tower on the mountain, the drifter afloat in space and of course as I’ve mentioned before the ascetic monk. It’s these kinds of characters, sometimes drawn as variations of the /r9k/ pantheon I was talking about earlier and sometimes just reposted pics found anywhere online, that are the second major kind of figure that appears in these threads. Often as well, there’ll just be empty rooms, or city streets with no people (or blurry silhouettes) and similar stuff too. I know it’s a stretch to say that the modern hikikomori (as an archetype, just like I said earlier about something else it’s rare you’ll find any person in the real world who embodies all associated traits) is the incarnation of what all those other figures are for the modern world, it’s just a loser who can’t get laid you may say. Maybe you’re right, but I see a connection there.

So I said that the only time you have depictions of a more social existence in these threads is when the frogs and cancer patients etc. are used but that’s not entirely true. There are also occasionally pictures of children, there’s two images which I can think of right now. One is this drawing of a bunch of Japanese schoolkids doing some kind of project near a big window during what looks like a summer break, the other is of three or maybe four boys playing on an N64 in their pyjamas. I think it’s clear why this is, it’s a case of looking back on childhood with rose tinted glasses. I’m absolutely guilty of this, I’ve made several posts on here in which I’ve done it. When I think of friendship, I think of being a child. Why wouldn’t I, it was when I was a child that I actually had friends. Well, up until my mid teens anyway. Of course I still have friends now, a few anyway although I had many more when I was little, but we see each other at best a few times a year. Clustered around the summer as well, so most of the year I don’t see anyone. The only real group of people with whom I can engage in friendly activities with, laughing about stupid jokes, arguing about anything from politics to art, sharing feels both positive and negative, is /r9k/. Who, that’s right, are best represented by this pantheon I guess I’m calling it now. Again, I think I’ve spent enough time with the robots to say that a lot of them are very similar to me in some fundamental ways, and therefore it’s fair for me to extrapolate my way of seeing things onto them I think. So I think that this is why it’s those characters or children who are necessary stand ins in order for most robots to see any kind of social gathering as /comfy/. A lot of normalfags might see a pub or bar with “interesting” strangers to talk to as comfy, but to any robot such a place would be the exact opposite. Because these threads represent /r9k/, and not only that but they get at the fundamental robot truth more than any other. The only other recurring thread I can think off that comes close would be those Frog and Feels threads but they seem to have stopped or at least become way less common over the last couple years. You can’t help but see these /comfy/ threads as basically the church, or temple, of the board when you think this way. The place where the soul resides.

Your weekly dose of total claptrap

I mentioned a woman in my second part of The Cure retrospective thing I did, and that I remember her so fondly specifically because I didn’t ever developing feelings or oneitis or whatever you want to call it. It’s hard to explain exactly, but I think what I said in that post was that the acquaintanceship (kind of a weird term, but it would feel strange to use the word relationship for someone I only knew a few weeks) will never feel tainted or impure. See I always feel gross or perhaps… sinful whenever I am attracted to or interested in a girl. I’ve had plenty of oneitises, I can’t even remember all of them very well at all. I always feel like I’m doing something wrong, that my mere interest is a great crime of some sort. Of course I know it’s not, but it’s one of those deeper things that can’t just be rationalised away. I’m really struggling to explain things in a way that makes sense, I’ve already had to delete several paragraphs of a different attempt at this post. See I’ve developed a technique for this blog thing now, when I started I was completely unstructured and would sit here writing for 6 or 7+ hours in a row and start and finish a post in one frantic session. Now I’m generally writing for an hour or so a day and that’s why I’m sort of keeping to a schedule by finishing a new one early every new week. The problem is that my mind doesn’t work that way, my mind will be racing with ideas about a subject when I start but I can’t just turn that on and off or even direct it. After a few days with something I’ll start obsessing over something else and it’s hard to stay focused. I know I have to though, I know that whatever I started a post about fascinated me and inspired me to share it for good reason. Surprisingly enough finding ideas to talk about is not getting harder like I was worried would happen after a month or two, if anything it’s getting easier. Having an outlet and having to be thinking about things more has stimulated my imagination and I find myself monologuing internally about all kinds of pointless things more than I have in years. It is helping me to feel like a child again in a way, and that is something I’ve longed for greatly for some time.

I am getting a really bad case of writer’s block though, not that I would call myself a writer but you know what I mean. I’m trying and trying and today I actually have been here for a good three hours with nothing to show for it. I’ve written quite a lot but it’s just going nowhere or I can’t get to what I really want to talk about. I don’t know what it is, I just need some kind of in. I had this for a little while with some other posts but I eventually always managed to get on a roll and write some of my favourite stuff from this blog in some cases all in an evening. Right now it’s like a night when I struggle to get to sleep, I roll from side to side and it’s getting later and later and that makes me more stressed and less likely to get any sleep. I’m having that exact same frustration right now, I know exactly what I want to talk about but I just can’t do it. I have all these ideas for a really clever entry that ties all these seemingly unrelated things together and has a central theme and usually I think I pull it off but I don’t know what’s going on today. Well today and yesterday, I started writing yesterday morning but got nowhere and deleted what I did have written when starting today. Essentially I had a surprisingly busy weekend, both evenings I went out to a restaurant. Nothing particularly special, but I am kind of a shut in so for me anything I do outside of work or hanging around at home is noteworthy. The first evening I went with some family friends and the second it was a social thing for work. I was planning for this post to go over some thoughts I was having over the weekend and link the two evenings in a few interesting ways. The problem is that for every little thing I feel I have to preface it with loads of information and that just bogs me down and I end up with a bloated mess that just has to go. I think I’m losing track of what I want to even be doing with this fucking blog thing. I got carried away with this idea of it being my own spiritual successor to My Twisted World, but that was never the original intention and it’s already something entirely different. It also is affecting what I do and don’t write here, because there’s this part of me thinking maybe don’t talk about certain things because I don’t want people who might one day read this to see me in that way. I think I should just stop disregarding my original title for this blog, even though it’s a kind of cringy title, because it’s when I follow that that I do my best. This isn’t a fucking biography, it’s not Anon’s manifesto, it’s just me collecting my thoughts as best as possible and spilling it out in (figurative) ink on a page.

I mean the idea was never a good one, that whole embarrassing situation that kicked this fucking blog off would be the worst first impression if I wanted someone to get an accurate picture of who I am. Just the fact that it was what motivated me in part to start writing here will make it seem way more important than it is. No, I think I got a little carried away with myself. This is really freeing actually, I’ve also felt like I need to try and make this more biographical over time trying to gradually tell all the more important stories that have happened to me over the years. I don’t need to do any of that, you don’t need to know a bunch of useless sob stories. I should stop writing for an imaginary group of people who don’t currently exist and do what has been going down well with those of you who read today. Of course when these stories about my life are relevant to what I want to talk about I won’t avoid them, but I should never be trying to fit my ideas around telling the story it should be the other way around. The information about me should serve the ultimate goal, of expressing what I’ve been thinking about. Because my whole life I’ve been plagued by excessive thinking, and I think that in a “throw enough shit at the wall” kind of way it does sometimes lead to interesting places. So this should just be a catalogue of these thoughts, a simple idea and hopefully actually worthwhile to anyone who chooses to read. It’s what I said I was going to do in my original introductory post after all.

So on this second evening, the less enjoyable of the two but probably the more interesting one, I remember that same feeling of disgust or maybe disappointment in myself I talked about right at the start hitting me. If you read all of these you might remember me mentioning not too long ago some new people started, and one of them I almost started to develop feelings for but luckily found out she had a boyfriend before that could really grow into anything. Luckily really is meant here as well, I realised this at the restaurant while there with her and of course all my other co-workers. It was because, and I know this might sound silly, I was enjoying myself. I had a really nice time, and I was able to enjoy being around them and chatting (not that much I’m still incredibly shy, but I’m warming up to them all a little and spoke more than the last of these certainly) without anything else. I wasn’t enjoying it like I’d enjoy conversations with one of the many oneitises I’ve had over the years, where I would be glad it went well because it felt like “progress” of some kind. No instead of it being a means to an end, and my gladness being for having achieved that, my enjoyment was of the actual conversation itself. I just liked talking to her, to all of them but of course for the context of this issue I’m talking about she’s most important. I feel really bad that those feelings of mine were ever developing at all, so soon after meeting someone. It just goes to show how false they were, like I’ve said (not that it’s any revelation) before it’s just my lizard brain or instinct trying to find a mate and my conscious self trying to rationalise it.

The problem is what I talked about in a lot of detail before in another post, Living up to my shitty blog title I think it was. That we’re essentially all God having an animal experience, and asceticism and rejection of many natural behaviours being so universal is because the explicit rejection of instinct is the easiest way we can perhaps get in touch with our divine aspect. So a buddhist sitting cross legged up in the Himalayas without eating for days and a nun taking a vow of celibacy really are getting at the same thing. The idea of artistic integrity I think ties in to this actually, another thing which seems to almost have universal importance to everyone. Why? Well I think because all art, anything which doesn’t just serve survival but has a more abstract purpose, is again an attempt at getting in touch with this higher aspect of ourselves. So the reason you see so many people who think “pop music sucks” or “modern Hollywood is trash”, etc. all feel that it’s a product designed to materially enrich certain people masquerading as “pure” art. Whatever original artistic vision there was has been corrupted, it feels wrong to them in a way they can’t fully explain. Now of course it’s far more complicated than that like all things, but I can understand their attitude I think. This is a complete tangent though, I was talking about work wasn’t I? The problem, as I was saying, is this conflict we all have between our instinct and our better nature. Id and super-ego? Maybe I am more off in the clouds than most, because any kind of behaviour motivated by instinct alone bothers me on principle. Being a human though, means I am still ultimately subject to this instinct. So to keep me from going fucking insane I convince myself somehow of all this crap that isn’t true. It’s not just desire to “go forth and multiply” I care about this person I know nothing about deeply that’s it.

It’s complicated, because I really do still even now kind of doubt it’s just sexual desire. In fact it’s definitely not that exclusively because often my oneitis at any given time isn’t the most attractive woman in the environment. I suppose like those major motion pictures that feel so hollow to everyone I need something real and true to manufacture the product around. To create this person in my mind, I have to know just enough and see some hint at a person I could like or even love. Still, I’m actively searching all the time and I still kind of am manufacturing this purely to satisfy the better nature. The beast is still the one who’s ends are being served, even if totally unsuccessfully because I’m a fucking incel haha… Anyway, I’m doing a really bad job of expressing myself. I say that so fucking often it’s like a recurring joke at this point. Maybe this will illustrate things best, an example. Often people will say “I wish I had a girlfriend” or that most famous line of poetry “tfw no gf”. Now something about that has always got under my skin, really bothered me in a way I couldn’t quite explain. See it might not be purely a sexual thing for the person saying it, they aren’t saying “I want to get laid” or “tfw no sex” they want someone to love but still they look towards “the gf” almost as a metaphysical ideal rather than any real life person. It’s dehumanising. I guess what I’m saying is that.. I don’t love. None of us do. I think I’m trying to say two things at once, and failing to communicate either. To try and somehow bring things back to the start though, I found something out about that woman from my days training at that social event for work. I thought I was her replacement but it turns out she actually got fired. Something I found amusing, anyway. Next post will hopefully be a lot less shit.

Maybe I’m just a schmuck

Some guy tried to scam me the other day, or maybe scam is the wrong word because it gives the wrong impression. It was more of a quick con, a clever little trick. It seems not to be that clever when you think about it, but then after thinking some more you go back to your original position of it being quite a clever little ruse. At least that’s my experience and I’ll explain. It worked on me once actually, this was the third time someone has tried this on me in the year since I started here. See, it was at work and it starts off with someone paying for what they want with a £10 note. The actual value isn’t important here for the trick, the number is, so you can substitute a note of your own currency that is a ten of something and this should still make sense. So they pay with a note for something very cheap maybe a pound or two, and then complain to the guy behind the till (me, in these three instances) when he gives them their change that they don’t want to carry around a load of coins and then they ask if they can give back all the coins along with some others they have adding it all back up to ten for the original note back. Now it should raise some suspicion already at this point that they have enough in change to get back to ten in coins, after all doesn’t this mean they could have just paid for the original item with coins alone. Yes, it does but you don’t realise this and in fact I only realised this after the third attempt was over when going over it. Because they’re quick, and they keep talking and can be very friendly. They know to try this when the shop is busy, so you’re not taking your time with each customer but trying to finish as quickly as possible and move on to the next person waiting in line and they know how to gain your trust.

The first time was the most “professional”, the guy actually asked me to double check the coins he was giving back to me definitely added up to ten “take your time mate, no rush”. Now of course, it takes a lot less time to give a note just handed to you back then it does to fish coins out of your wallet. So you always end up giving them the note before they’ve finished scraping £10 in coins to give back to you. Again, this extra few coins they find is what could have been used to buy the original item, they literally have to get specifically the value of the original item in coins to make it back up. It’s so fucking obviously suspect at this point I’m shocked I didn’t even realise this until after the third attempt was over. I mean like I said not until my time thinking about this yesterday, which is basically going to be what this entry covers, did I realise it. So then with the coins all counted, he then hands you back the original note as you’re putting it back into the till and says now he’s given you £20 (half true, he’s just handed you that much, but of course half of it is yours) can he get a £20 note back. I know I know it’s so fucking insane that I or anyone ever fell for this, but I promise going through it all step by step and being there in the moment especially when you’re just not expecting to be scammed (which I will get back to in more detail later) and it’s all happening so fast are two very different things.

The first time this happened to me, I didn’t even fully realise until the guy was long gone. I kind of knew something felt wrong during the last step, as I handed him the £20 note, but there were customers waiting and I suppose I didn’t want to bother the guy in case my suspicion was unfounded and no mistake/ scam had took place and I’d just be slowing down the queue. I kept going over it in my head as I was dealing with customers though and after half an hour or so it slowed down and I had a brief moment with no customers waiting. Then it all made sense, and I just paid £10 of my own money into the till so I wouldn’t be accused of stealing from the till or something by the higher ups. It’s not a huge deal, just over an hour’s work at this place, and it serves as good motivation to not let it happen again. So even though I didn’t fully realise until it was over my suspicions were raised at the point where he asked for the £20 note, the very last step. This is one of several crucial points, and I keep changing my mind over which is most important. These several points being places both where the scam can fall apart, and yet have to happen in order to pull the scam off. In some ways that might not seem immediately obvious as well, there is a surprising richness to it all. I almost have to respect those who can pull it off properly, the first guy in my case. I mean sure in part he got away with it because it was my first time, but I’m not so sure the other two would have been able to pull it off even if they’d got there first. They just didn’t have the adroitness that he did, the second guy was a balding manlet who was with his mother or perhaps she was his sister (or both probably) and I ended up throwing the money over the counter at him when he wouldn’t leave and the most recent guy the other evening got all pissy with me after being called out and I was a little worried he might get violent. He called me really rude and told me to never touch his hands again (because I’d pushed the hand holding the note away when he kept trying to reach over the counter and put it in the till) then kept staring at me from outside the shop for a while. In fact the second guy and the old bitch with him also did the same months ago when they tried it, scowling at me from just outside. The totally unjustified indignation of these people is really something to see.

So speaking of these crucial points there seems to me to be three of them. Firstly when you hand them the note back, which has to happen before they give you your coins. The most recent time this didn’t happen, he was maybe not so experienced and handed the £10 in coins to me pretty fast. I, at this point recognising the motions as well also was deliberately holding onto the note so that was a factor as well but if he knew what he was doing he’d have at least tried something to get the note off me before handing me the coins. “Yeah, so just pass me that note mate while I get the rest of the coins out” or something, it would also work as a distraction. After all if I’m busy getting the note I’m not coming to the realisation that he has enough coins to just pay for the item with those. Which I didn’t anyway I know, but someone sharper than me might. See it’s important because if he then has all the money, when he hands you it all together there’s the psychological trick of it seeming like it’s all his to give. This entire scam falls apart if each step is done in a slow and deliberate fashion it has to be snappy, which must make it difficult to practise now I think about it. There’s this kind of unspoken rule in shops that the customer hands you the money first and then the person behind the till reciprocates by giving them what they paid for. So that could be the item, a receipt, everything together placed in a bag. The point being that the final action taken is by the person behind the till. So when the guy hands you all the money not only is the psychological trick playing on the fact that it seems like everything they handed to you (all £20 in both note and coins) is theirs but the natural ending to your customer interactions is almost always with you handing them something. It’s not something that is taught, when I did my training both where I am now and at another place I worked for free that I’m sure I’ve talked about here before it was never mentioned. It’s just something you end up doing, it’s cultural maybe or just some kind of natural law idk. What I do know is that it’s never really something you’re consciously aware of until you have to be, like in the case of overthinking this scam. So when you get handed the money you’re thrown for a second because the interaction seems to be over but they and not you made the last move. I suppose in this state you’re more suggestible, and then they come in and ask for a £20 note for it all and without enough time to think it through rationally you just go with it.

That’s just one thing though. Of equal importance is the moment when they take that extra amount in coins to add to the change you just gave them making it of equal value to the note. Like I said, they literally have to get exactly the amount in coins for what they bought which means they never needed a note in the first place. It should be obvious, so why even in the two examples of this scam failing to work on me did I somehow miss it. Well there’s this idea of the big lie, in Mein Kampf (which again I haven’t read in full, I’m just aware of some ideas talked about inside) Hitler speaks about a lie so brazen and obviously false that people just accept it. After all, would someone lie about something like that. Every step of this scam is done right in front of you, right fucking there less than a meter away, and this step is the most obvious of them all. Because people are looking to catch a lie, somewhere something sneaky is taking place. You might smell a rat, something might seem suspect. You’re entirely unprepared for someone to tell you the sky is red, or whatever, and if you’re not really concentrating you might nod your head and go along without even realising it. Of course they target the kind of person who isn’t expecting to be lied to or tricked at all, in a sneaky way or a totally open and upfront way. I’ll get to that later though. If you do call them out at this point, if you’re one of the sharper tools in the shed, they haven’t yet done anything wrong. They can say they just didn’t realise until after paying they had that extra change, or something along those lines. This is the most obvious point in the scam and it’s before any real wrongdoing has taken place, if you don’t say anything they know they can probably get away with the rest of the scam which is less obvious until the very end and if you do they can exit the situation without any embarrassment.

Now the third and final crucial step, which is probably the obvious one, is before they even walk in. They of course need to figure out if they think they can get you to fall for it before they even start. I don’t think it’s entirely just a stupid person they’re looking for (because I don’t believe I’m a stupid person, although maybe I appear to be?) but more someone who seems to have a certain naivety or innocence. Which is definitely something I’m aware of about myself, I look very young I get told this often and not only that but because of my shyness/ timidity it’s exacerbated even more. I hate this faggy term so much but you could say I suppose that I lack, or at least look like I lack, street smarts. I’m an easy mark I know, a good target, someone that you can take advantage of. I’m aware of this weakness at least, but nevertheless as much as I think about it I can’t just logic my way out of this one. I’m a pushover, I’m better at standing up for myself now than I was but I still have a way to go. Maybe I’ll never get there as well, there’s part of me that doesn’t want to for fear of losing some part of myself. Think about it, I am this way for two reasons. First of all because I want people’s lives to be easy, within reason I will do what I can to help. Secondly because I would never scam or take advantage of someone myself and I’m honest about my intentions with people I’m kind of expecting the same from other people. Yes I know it’s stupid and to keep being this way after being taken advantage of is… even stupider, but it’s who I am. So I’d have to either become a scumbag myself in order to become not a pushover or at the very least become way more mercenary and cold to people. Which I rationally should do, I mean sure some people are nice to me but no one (well, my dad so one person) cares about me really. So why should I care about anyone else? I do though, it’s just instinctual I want people to be happy.

I think about this a lot, obviously, and I guess the real problem is that my ingroup is just way too easy to get into. You should be aware of the idea of ingroups and outgroups, but you can look it up on Wikipedia if you don’t. Basically most people have a relatively small group of people they care about, which would be their ingroup. Family, close friends, etc. To these people they are far nicer than everyone else. Now because of various circumstances both within and outside of my control I don’t really have many people in my life. I have my dad, my uncle and his partner and their children, a couple of close-ish friends and a few other people with more unusual roles in my life. So I have this idea which could be complete conjecture but seems to make some sense, that perhaps because I have so few people around me, on some level not fully consciously (I know, I say that way too much) I’m way more open than most to letting people in. After all we are social animals, as I’m sure you’ve been told a thousand times before, so perhaps in some attempt to build an ingroup like everyone else has for myself my lizard brain takes the wheel and despite me knowing that being like this with everyone is not a good idea at all for all the obvious reasons I still do it. Of course ironically, because being completely spineless just disgusts people, it actually ends up having the completely opposite effect from what is intended. This could take me back down the whole “nice guys” rabbit hole again if I let it, and it’s a complete tangent anyway, but it’s something for you to think about if you want.

To wrap things up, they target people look like they can be taken advantage of because they’re more inclined to trust them and they need to be trusted for that final part. Remember when they hand you all the money and ask for the £20 note, that works because you’re kind of thrown off by the order of things being wrong and they then come in to bring order almost by asking. If you don’t trust them that doesn’t work, and that’s why they act so friendly and do little things like that first guy asking for me to make sure all the change he handed me was correct. None of this even works if you’re not already quite a trusting individual. See looking at all of this it shows to me how purposeful it all is, sure you can say I’m overanalysing this but given that these crucial parts were not done properly by the other two who didn’t get away with it I don’t think I am. Moral of the story, at least in my view? Everything is deliberate, and I really do mean everything. At least, I think I do. Anyway I’m listening to The Killing Moon by Echo and The Bunnymen right now, it feels appropriate for some reason.

The truth hurts

I saw her again even though I thought I never would and had mentally moved on a lot quicker than I expected to, for reasons I’ve already speculated about in earlier posts. I’m talking about the girl, my “oneitis” for a time I suppose, who left the place we both worked at a few months ago and just before I started this blog. From what I can tell we were at some kind of daycare centre or some place like that, looking after the children supposedly but I can’t actually recall any kids being there now when I think back. It was strange, the walls were a flaxen yellow and there were colourful childlike drawings all over the walls. A rainbow with a pot of gold, a dinosaur or monster of some kind, an attempted self portrait, and plenty more. It was from what I could understand one room in a larger building with several purposes. The daycare/ children’s area that we were in was one big rectangle separated into two halves almost by these metal beds and some wooden book and toy shelves. So there was a little narrow pass near the wall halfway across the room, but the shelves were all quite low of course because kids can’t reach high up so you could see the entire room from either side. There were also toys strewn all over the floor. I remember holding one for a moment, a little painted wooden train.

I can’t even really remember how or why I was in this situation, I just was. I had been trying to send a message to someone else, another woman who I’ve never met before or since and was supposedly lost in a forest. She had an internet connection though, because she managed to contact me somehow and was asking me for help to find her way out. She wanted me to give her the directions which I must have known at the time and they had to be in the form of several brief vocaroo messages. Even though I couldn’t see her as I was in the daycare centre, although unaware of it at the time, I somehow knew what she looked like. She was sitting down against a giant oak tree trunk with her hair in a ponytail, wearing that kind of middle class outdoorsy style of clothing. A quilted jacket and check shirt, wellies without any mud or dirt on them, fine leather gloves and a woollen hat, you know the look. So I sent the first message and then listened back to it as you do, but I had the very common experience of hearing your own voice recorded and it sounding way different to normal. So feeling uncomfortable about that I put my phone away and decided to just forget the whole situation, and realised I was here in this daycare place. In there with me was oneitis (maybe ex-oneitis now, idk what to call her) and another third person I didn’t recognise. The third person never said anything, I think she just faded into the background after some time. I was surprised to see her as I’ve already said, and she seemed surprised as well. She asked me how I’d been, and what I was doing there (I had a reason at the time I’m sure, but it escapes me now) and told me this was where she worked now. She was so friendly, it was just like when we were both working together. Actually no it wasn’t, but it was like the few times when I was actually able to hold a conversation with her. So we were cleaning up or doing something else menial for some time, and she just turned to me at one point and said she got the note I left behind the last day I saw her. I said I was really glad to hear it, I’d worried for a little while if it had blown away or somehow not been seen for whatever reason and it was nice to know that not only was it seen but it was appreciated and didn’t come off as creepy or weird. She told me she had wanted to reply, to text me a quick thank you but had been so busy and after a couple days worried herself it would seem weird to reply because of the time gap and decided to leave it. The whole thing came out of nowhere, a real sense of closure but only after I had first accepted there wouldn’t be. I mean it, I felt a genuine satisfaction that this whole embarrassing lapse in judgement was behind me for good even after waking up and realising it was a dream.

It’s weird, we think of a dream as “not real” and sure it’s not “real” but we’re still definitely in there. When you wake up it isn’t a hard cut, often after a particularly vivid or intense dream it can take a good 20 minutes to fully separate the two worlds. Usually it’s less, maybe a few seconds or a minute, but nevertheless it still disorients you waking from a dream however briefly. So that’s what I was getting, that warm feeling of knowing my message had been seen and getting to say a proper goodbye which I’d missed remained with me for some time as I was slowly coming around. I went about my usual morning routine, made a cup of coffee and sat down in front of my laptop and immediately wrote the first line for what would eventually become this entry. “The walls were a flaxen yellow”. I knew already the dream was important, but I hadn’t even had time to process it completely and I didn’t actually go back until this afternoon and start writing again. I know it’s been a while, I’ll be honest I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 in almost all my spare time when not at work. I haven’t been this invested in any kind of vidya since Dark Souls 3, it’s so fucking comfy. I have been thinking about the dream and this lingering feeling that stayed with me though, and I realise it’s been a week since I’ve uploaded so I’ll try to get something finished. See, it might not be materially real sure but that feeling I had was as real as if I’d have bumped into her walking around one day and had a similar interaction. At least for a time anyway, after waking that is. I already talked about this before, but I kind of fell for a character anyway not really the person herself. Not an entirely separate person sure, but I suppose the best way of explaining this is to say that when she wasn’t actually around is when I got to know her best.

So what does it matter if the thing that inspired this feeling in me wasn’t “real”, because the feeling itself certainly was. If anything it’s appropriate that an interaction in my head is what it took to bring me some closure. It didn’t last forever, I eventually woke up completely and that feeling had faded. Still I know I felt it, the feeling was as real as can be, the brain processes that would have taken place following a similar interaction irl happened in my head just because of a dream. It was real, real real, materially real, I can’t think of another way to put it. It makes me think of this video I saw a while ago, maybe a year or two. There was this youtube e-celeb I followed for a while, I always tire of these people eventually but he lasted quite some time, and he made this video about a lighter he bought while visiting the US. It might be one of my favourites of his, a brief 10 minute thing. It’s the delivery that I appreciate, he presents things much more intelligently than most on the platform and especially in that sphere of it. Instead of the constant and irksome authoritative statements most of the dunning-kruger faggots on there constantly shit out, he tended to present things as if he was not entirely sure himself. Some would say that shows weakness or cowardice because he’s not willing to commit but that’s misguided in my opinion. I think people who are more intelligent (or at least more thoughtful, I’ve already gone into the distinction in some detail before here) do linger at this earlier stage in the thought process. So anyway he talks about how he kept this lighter, misplaced it for a while and then one day found it again. This lighter, which he’d bought in the US, was like a keepsake. So while the lighter itself was had no real material or monetary value (it had even run out of lighter fluid) it had the good memories from that time tied to it and also served as a little reminder every time he looked at it to one day return there. He had also been to one of the Scandinavian countries since then though, and they have 7/11s as well, in that period between losing the lighter and finding it again. That trip had been more brief and hectic, so he might have picked another lighter up and forgotten all about it, and now he thought he’d found the original but it was actually just another empty plastic lighter among millions. Those memories that were brought back from looking at this maybe-not-the-original-lighter that first time finding it again were just as real as if he knew for certain it was the original. If anything, knowing for certain might sever the connection and so the truth would only be a negative thing. I’d agree because after I’d fully woken up I lost that sense of closure again, but when I was coming to and still between two worlds the connection remained. It was the last thing to go actually, I suppose because I wanted to hold onto it far more than the flaxen yellow room and that little toy train.

There is one crucial difference between the two anecdotes of course, his original lighter and holiday were very much real and if there was a second it was also, whereas my dream was all in my head. Why do I have this attitude that my feelings being a response to a dream make them less.. meaningful though? I mean dreams can be very powerful, plenty of real world decisions made by various important figures throughout history were inspired by dreams. From my own experience, I know I’ve seen a different side to people I know in dreams (as I’m less spergy and more comfortable around people in them for whatever reason) and it has genuinely made it ever so slightly easier to be around them irl. This other side has even turned out to be quite accurate to how they are somehow in some cases. So dreams aren’t just the refuse dump for our subconscious as some people say, they clearly have at least the potential to be a powerful tool of intuition. You can learn something about yourself by looking at the content of your dreams as well, often something you dwelled on very briefly will shows up there weeks later while things you in your most sober waking moments think to be most important never do. It’s rather unusual, at least for me anyway, for something to feel worth paying attention to in both states. I’m not quite sure, I feel like I could have done a better job with this but I’m having a small mental block. It’s really late (or early) and I’ve been sitting writing this for hours. I know, for several hours of time I haven’t got much to show for it. This is what’s been really making me think this week though, maybe I’ll come back to the subject another time more prepared.